The Growing Need for Business Process Management

This blog is a part of our business process management series. Read our complete series to understand how a BPM life cycle looks like, how to implement BPM step by step, what features to look for in a BPM solution, and more. 

From pandemic to recession to dwindling market share, businesses face situations that threaten their survival from time to time. But those with inflexible or irregular processes are hit particularly hard. 

Businesses who can’t correct the process course on the go or quickly adapt to the contingencies will suffer great deviation in day-to-day operations and eventually crash. Forget market threats. Inflexible processes fail the moment when a business scales or upgrades to a different work model. 

Process avoidance costs you

Imagine running a startup of fifty employees. At this stage, employees can quite manage their operations. You may have one technical expert who oversees all the IT issues with ease. But you will not stay a startup forever. You have way too many people now to place accountability on a single process owner. A monopoly of operations can halt the end business processes when the owner simply takes a day off or quits the company. Furthermore, operations will be all over the place because you never established formal processes that state how to share documents or whom to send expense reports.  

The need for process mapping

Getting a bunch of people to work towards a common objective doesn’t automatically ensure smooth operations. Process failures are often attributed to employee inefficiency or tight deadlines when the real problem is a lack of well-mapped business processes. Because creating a stable environment for operations requires you to reconsider the way you fundamentally manage your business processes. 

Urged by the need to create a fluid process framework that ensures stability and longevity in a rapidly changing market, process experts are moving towards business process management. It is a discipline that allows you to proactively define, map, and optimize your business processes. By standardizing the way every process works, BPM makes even the most unwieldy processes easy to manage. 

How process mapping ensures process stability

Mapping and standardizing business processes with a BPM system ensure process stability in many ways:

Process ownership. Most businesses limit core processes to an elite group of technical experts. You may have needlessly lengthy processes or only a selected few users are trained to use a specific tool. BPM, however, enables you to build workflows on a platform that is accessible and easy to use for all those involved in a process. Users can streamline, optimize, and automate processes easily when they are in complete control. 

Knowledge democratization. Process stability means the uninterrupted flow of operations in an event of a change or transition, like when you scale. Tying processes to individuals is not a recipe for stability or scalability. When they leave, they take the process knowledge with them. To ensure continuity, you should offer complete process visibility for everyone in the organization. 

Process centralization. You may be a fifty-person organization or a five hundred-person one. You should document your processes regardless. A business process management system is the most reliable and dedicated solution to maintaining a centralized repository of real-time process information. When a process breaks, you should be able to trace back to the issue. Centralization of processes helps you do that. 

Process compliance. Every process has certain guidelines to comply with. Without it, any fluctuation in the process behavior goes unnoticed. Business process automation or workflow automation allows you to dictate the entire process flow one time and ensure compliance every single time. It also keeps manual errors and bottlenecks from creeping into workflow management.

Process continuity. You may have a dynamic blueprint of workflows. But can you expect every business activity to follow the blueprint? You can’t. You should rather have a business process management software that allows designing flexible and adaptable workflows for continuity. 

Start mapping business processes

In a market condition where change is inevitable, it pays to invest in process stability. When you map business processes, you establish contingency plans and adaptive workflows to keep you prepared. Moreover, business process management gives you complete transparency into the process life cycle to undertake improvement measures and align performance with the overarching business strategy.